Sometimes He'll Bleed
by Kay the Cricketed
Summary: [Slight MaesRoy implications, very mild] Sometimes Roy Mustang wonders where he would be if he'd never met Maes Hughes. It's not an answer he'd want to know.


_Sometimes He'll Bleed_

By Kay

Disclaimer: Don't own FMA or Roy. Very disappointing. Someone buy me them.

Author's Notes: Slight Maes/Roy SLASH implications, but nothing concrete—you can ignore the one paragraph of it, and it's very mild. Mostly just a thought of where Roy could be if not influenced by Maes' friendship. The scenes flip between reality (normal font) and an AU universe where Maes Hughes never met Roy Mustang (italics). Enjoy!

Might have disturbing imagery. Sorry.

* * *

Roy sometimes wonders, staring at the shadowed planes of his ceiling at night with nothing but silence to hold him, what would have happened if he hadn't met Hughes.

_The academy is like an empty, barren maze of hallways and stifling classrooms, mapped out in black and white tiles that always maintain the same pattern. The tiles mean every footstep is echoed, but he can never tell the differences between them because everyone walks in the same clipped, militaristic manner. They are soldiers already marching into battle, books tucked under their arms while their boots work away at the ground in unison. It is organized; controlled. _

Roy hates it. He tries to tell himself he is not a drone like these other men, but he cannot deny it when his steps fall into their own. No one looks at him in this prison. No one speaks to him, too busy in their own affairs.

He feels like a ghost, if not for the echoes. And he hates them even more for it.

It's not a pretty thought. It's not even a simple one-- his mind can't comprehend the idea of a world without the constant presence at his shoulder. It can't process the concept of being alone. Because Maes Hughes has always been there, that's all, like the warm spot against your neck during the summer that refuses to go away. His eyes close with that reassurance; he basks in it. Maes is his warm spot.

Maes is always two steps ahead of everyone, including himself, and that shows. He walks just a beat too fast. He smiles just a second too quickly. He stumbles and gets up before anyone has realized he has fallen, and he's already reaching out a hand to steady the ones ready to trip over the same rocks.

Roy tries to remember what it was like before he had a warm spot. It seems cold. It seems unsteady. He had too many scrapes on his knees still scabbing over with bubbling red skin, before Maes and his warmth.

_He spends most of his nights with women, trading them off and on in a manner that would have horrified his mother. But his mother doesn't speak to him anymore, so that's alright. Sometimes, if he's been sleeping with a secretary for too long, they'll ask to meet her. He always laughs at them. _

He doesn't particularly care about them, though. He's a little ashamed of that, but it's hard. The nights are chilly and lonely-- he misses the sweet air of his home, and the friendly taunts of his old schoolmates. The men here are different. The older ones are haunted, bitter, the faded apparitions of too many drinks and not enough mercy. The younger ones are arrogant and presumptuous. They have little time for someone like Roy Mustang, who cares nothing for their opinions and spends most of his time in the library, fingers brushing thick volumes.

So he's alone. Roy can handle that. He's always been that way, even at home. All he really needs is another breath at night. Another body.

In time, it becomes hollow of meaning. Roy wonders if it always has been.

To be honest, Roy sometimes admits when the red digital clock beside his bed has slipped into the earliest hours of the morning, he wouldn't be anywhere without Maes Hughes. Because the person he has become, for better or worse, has always been influenced by that man.

Back in the academy, he'd been the only one to acknowledge Roy Mustang as something besides another number in the log. He had been Roy's right hand man, his best friend. At nights, they would play cards and trade stories. Talk about their families and homes. Mock the food. Mock the rest of the students. Mock Maes' obsession with getting married.

_'Yet you spend your nights with me,'_ Roy would tell him dryly, flipping a four-pair across the wooden floor. He had enjoyed sitting by the bed, boots flipped off messily and shoved under it. _'What does that say about you?'_

Maes would say, _'It's only a matter of time.'_

It always is, Roy thinks now. It always will be.

_He's almost ready to gradute, and then it will be like being swept off into a dream, something he can't control and has no idea on how to navigate. Legally, he's old enough to drink, and so on his twenty-first birthday he goes to a bar and orders a drink with a new ID card that's still glistening from being laminated. Then he perches gingerly on the slightly sticky stool, holding the glass of amber liquid like it will burn straight through his fingers-- he doesn't wear gloves because he doesn't want to get them wet. They'll just smell like alcohol then. _

He's an alchemist and a soldier now, he thinks to himself. He can have the world if he wants it.

But everyone sits two seats down from him for this very reason. The jukebox is unnaturally quiet, and Roy sips his drink in silence, and leaves the change on the counter when he walks away.

He graduates in another year or so. No one comes to see him, but he listens to the uneven pattern of footsteps as the guests pour through the school, and that makes something in him crumble.

Roy doesn't remember having another friend like Maes. No one else knows him as well-- they haven't seen him falter, haven't heard him laugh. Not like Maes has. He rarely drinks without him, simply because he's so accustomed to having a partner-- he's long understood that drinking alone only brings the shadows into his eyes, darkening them to the charred black he brings everything else to. The memories are too hard to keep out without his defenses.

He likes drinking with Maes, though. Maes knows how to appreciate the low din of a bar, the cold click of ice in a glass. He speaks in a soft voice when they meet there, the neon lights reflecting in his glasses, and Roy enjoys that, the sound humming through his veins along with the alcohol and the steady heat of an elbow at his own. Sometimes they'll sit for hours. They go there even if they don't have to exchange information.

Of course, it slowed in time. Maes had eventually gotten married. Roy had brought a purpose to his life.

Roy remembers one night, after having imbibed a little too indulgently, how Maes propped him against his shoulder as they walked. His fingers scraped across the wall they were following, arm outstretched to do so, and he'd idly wondered where his gloves had disappeared to. The air had been cool, refreshing, filling his lungs. He'd been warm.

He had known he was leaning too close, too eagerly into his best friend, but his brain was filled with the buzz of indifference. When he put his bare fingers to Maes' chest, he could feel his heartbeat pounding inside of the uniform and its golden tassels and stripes. But maybe that had been his own. He remembers laughing shakily against that shoulder, burying his face into it and suddenly feeling utterly miserable.

Maes was speaking, steady and gentle against his ear, but he hadn't listened. Roy wonders now what he'd said.

_It doesn't take long before the war comes. That's when everything goes to Hell. _

He doesn't bother to fight the request for State Alchemists to join in the fray. This is almost what he's been waiting for, in a way-- when he packs his suitcases, gazing around the empty room, he suddenly realizes that he's never belonged here. Not really. He says no goodbyes; the only trace of himself he leaves is a scorched brick wall out in a training area he likes to frequent. Even that will be gone by the time he comes home.

He spends the train ride reading up on Ishvar, trying to prepare himself. But nothing could have really prepared him. Not really.

He hadn't expected the scorched sand and blinding heat. Couldn't predict that weary, scratched faces of the men, the drag of their steps that in no way resembled the clipped steps of their training. He isn't ready for the brown-skinned people they aren't really warring with, the ones who are more like victims with their scabbed ankles and thickly woven shawls, and he's not ready for the brutality of this massacre. It hits him hard in the gut, the bitter punch of reality, and he spends most of his time half-frantically trying to stop the sickness in his stomach. He's always choking on sand, on sweat, on bile, and he swallows it down into himself, all of it, until he can purge himself into the dirt and hide it in grasses so the men won't see his shame.

But Roy gets by. He's good at that. In time, after he's washed enough in blood, he doesn't even care.

He asks himself why he was born. If he has a purpose for being here.

Then they give him the ring. It is the answer he's been seeking, and it nearly destroys them all.

When the war had come, Roy hadn't asked for a desk job. Not like Maes. After meeting Gracia and falling utterly in love, as he so claimed, the man hadn't been willing to risk it. He had buried himself into intelligence work with gusto, sending off documents and secrets rather than getting on the train like Roy had chosen. Roy envies him for that. He thinks he should have stayed home, belonging amongst his books and the dinners with Maes and Gracia, and the colorful banners of the market where he buys his fruit for its freshness.

But he had gone willingly, and truthfully Roy thinks it might have been for the best. He hates that idea. But he also knows that, had he stayed, nothing would have changed. Nothing.

He learns what sacrifice and price means in war. What greed and terror can do. He sees men slaughter children in the wake of fear for their own lives, watches buildings sink into the sand, leaving nothing behind but rocks in the dirt. He tastes blood in his mouth, gritty against his tongue and gums, and breathes the ash of his own handiwork. He'd never known what it was to burn someone alive. Not until the war. Not until it is about survival, about following orders that made his stomach churn, until he knows what it means to be so afraid of what you're doing that you destroy everything around you so that you can't see. When he burns things, he makes the smoke thick and black to hide his masterpieces.

He doesn't want to see what he's done. But he knows. It's saturated into the fabric of his gloves and uniform. It lingers on his skin. He scrubs in the showers, rubs away at his flesh until it's red lobster raw, until blood curls down into the drain, but even then he's not clean. The knowledge scorches into his brain. The truth.

That's when he receives the ring. And a letter from Maes, ecstatically scrawled in blank ink, _'She said yes! She said yes, Roy, I'm getting married, I'm…'_ and he cries pathetically in his tent as they call them to arms.

_He thinks that nothing could be worse than this. _

It had been bad enough, hadn't it? After the massacre, the night of the thousand lights and screams, he had thought it was over. He spends the rest of the week hiding in his tent, throwing up in a burlap bag and screaming into his pillow, and none of the soldiers will meet his red-rimmed eyes anymore. He tries to pretend nothing's wrong. It's the nightmares that remind him.

But he eats like he's starving, and soon he frantically thinks that maybe, even in his exhausted and sunken state, he can survive this. He's Roy Mustang. He's nothing to anyone, but that just means he can make it. He'll find a way.

And then the voice saying, "Shoot them. We can't afford to let them live," and he doesn't even think about it. He just numbly holds the gun up and pulls the trigger.

The doctor's eyes are wide open when it hits his chest and splatters blood over the floor. He hits the floor without a struggle. Like a sack of flour. Just crumples and Roy feels something inside of him die-- he doesn't even hesitate to shoot the woman as she screams, utterly broken, grappling at her husband. In the remaining silence, he empties the rest of his clip into them and watches the blood trickle in rivers across the cement. His superior says nothing.

He takes that as a good sign.

He leaves straight after, passing a horrified Dr. Marcoh who stands in the hallway beyond. He knows that man will talk with their superior. He knows what he's done is wrong. He feels something vaguely wrong in his chest, a clenching that tightens against his lungs as if accusing him for breathing in air.

In the morning, Dr. Marcoh is being held for attempting to escape. Roy passes the tent where he's held and twinges, but it's only the heat, and he walks straight on through the camp until he reaches the ruins of the Ishvar city. There, in the ghost town that is now empty of life and riddled with bodies, corpses that are still smoking in places or spread out in ash swirled in the sand, he finally stops and drops to his knees.

He thinks about shooting himself. But he can't work up the energy. He just stares at the world around him and waits for someone to bury him with the rest of the casualties.

The sounds are imprinted upon his mind like brands, claiming him to the leftover days of nightmares. The ring made a funny sound on his finger whenever he snapped them-- it scraped badly against the flint cloth. But it soon disappears behind the deafening screech of metal and rock as it falls to the ground, building after building, like a row of dominoes crashing to earth like he'd done as a child, over and over again until he can almost pretend to block out the screams.

When he dreams, he hears them all.

He almost doesn't survive it. He doesn't remember an entire two days from afterwards-- they are a blank, desolate space in his mind-- but he wakes up on the third morning with the sun beaming through the tent flaps, and Armstrong, a man he only knew through a few conversations (most of which involving Maes, who had taken to his exuberant personality) is sitting beside his cot. His head is in his massive hands; he'd fallen asleep beside Roy in the same clothes he'd worn during battle. For a moment, the words won't come to Roy's dried, cracked tongue.

_'What happened?'_ he finally asks.

Armstrong's transition from sleep to the waking world is effortless and unnoticeable. _'We were worried,'_ he says, and that's when Roy finally realizes that he can't move. His hands are bound to the bed with ripped sheets, his fingernails clogged with sand and sweat and crusting blood, and every part of them hurts. They are so scratched, cuts so deeply delved, that he knows they didn't bandage them for fear the gauze would seep into and meld into the wounds.

He meets Armstrong's eyes, horrified, and the man's pinched face grows more drawn than before. _'We were worried,'_ he says again, voice rumbling loudly in the stillness, and finally Roy understands.

Armstrong barely unties him in time before it comes-- and then Roy is pitching over the cot, convulsing violently, his hair over his eyes and the strangled sounds of grief filling the quiet.

_No one comes to take him away. He can't even make it the entire time. He gets up and leaves when it becomes apparent that he will die of heatstroke before anything else comes for revenge, and by then it just isn't worth it. _

He deserves to live, anyway. Maybe the doctors had family. Maybe they'll kill him in the end, after he's home.

Maybe, maybe, Roy thinks hysterically, and smiles chillingly at the men who dare to meet his eyes for the rest of the clean-up week.

When he pulls the trigger, Roy is too good of a shot to pretend he can miss the target. The bullet hit the doctor's wife dead-on, showering the wall with blood and leaving her battered form to collapse onto the dirty cement. Behind him, Gran is saying something coldly, but he can't hear for the ringing in his ears. It is high pitched and ugly, a shriek that he can't begin to recognize as his own.

_'Not again,'_ he wants to say. _'I've done enough. Not again.'_

But his fingers are already squeezing automatically, and the man is still looking down at his wife in incomprehension, unable to process it behind his confused eyes, and he doesn't even see the shot coming before it blows his brains through his skull. He jerks and falls like a puppet held up on string, draping over his wife as if even in death he will protect her, and Roy sees the end of the world beyond them.

He had argued. He wants to remind himself, to fight off the deadened numbness that now surrounds him. He had told Gran he wouldn't do it. He had protested. He had…

He had shot them, Roy thinks and almost laughs. He looks at the picture of the little girl on the floor. It is so covered in blood that he can't see her smile anymore, not really, and he wonders distantly when Maes and Gracia will be having their own little girl to coddle. It's about time, isn't he? He doesn't know.

He's going to be sick. He's not going to make it.

Dr. Marcoh comes in. He doesn't hear what's said, but he knows he'll never be able to look anyone in the eyes again. He can't bear this. He can't bear this.

He leaves with the door dangling open behind him, fleeing, trying blindly to be anywhere but here. He buys a bottle of the strongest thing the camp has to offer from an amputee sitting against the hospital tent, who looks as if he couldn't care less about the dollars shoved in his hand for payment. The drink burns a trail down his throat. He idly wonders what would happen if he stuck his fingers down past his tonsils and snapped.

He finds himself stumbling past the fire, through the groups of laughing men who say they can't wait to be home, and finds himself back in the building. Gran moves fast-- the bodies are gone. The blood stain remains, though, and the liquor is already gone, acid eating holes in his stomach lining, and he drops the bottle.

He can't bear this. He's not going to make it.

He's thinking of Maes when he reaches for it. He's thinking of going home to him and seeing his steady, smiling friend at the train station waiting for him to step back on familiar soil. He's thinking about walking to him slowly and then hugging him before he can see Roy's flat eyes, just hugging him and squeezing his burning eyes shut and pretending for one second that he didn't just kill a man that had looked like Maes when he laughed, and he's thinking of Maes frantically asking him what's wrong, and what would happen when he finally looked up and had to lie, had to say something, anything, and how he would live knowing that Maes knew that, and his empty apartment and the meaningless books and the endless shot glasses and Maes, always Maes, who didn't even begin to realize what his old friend was doing in the middle of a train station with his arms tight around his shoulders.

He pulls the gun out and it hits the bottom of his chin so hard that it hurts. Oh God. Oh God. He can't bear this.

In the end, though, he does. Because Dr. Marcoh tells him to let him go. Because he knows that he has to go to that train station, and he has to see Maes alive and well and untouched by the war, and he has to stand with his arms at his sides, cold, stiff, unyielding, because Maes can never know.

And because Roy Mustang is many things, and one of them is a coward.

_When he returns to Central, no one meets him at the station. He steps off of the train and looks around, not knowing what he expects to see. _

People are welcoming the soldiers home. They throw their arms around their husbands and friends, laughing painfully into their ears and crying silently into their shoulders. The men are praying. The men are crying, too, and it's more than he ever saw at Ishvar. Roy turns away indifferently.

He leaves the station with clipped strides, and by that night he's paid rent for an apartment in the city. It is empty and white. The wooden floor echoes like the academy. For once, Roy is surprisingly comforted by that. He doesn't have anything really to unpack except a few remaining books and some clothes, and he sleeps on the floor until he can get a bed the next day.

He doesn't know what he will do now. He doesn't know where he will go.

When it becomes apparent that no one is blaming him, he gives up on being punished. No one is going to do it for him; he must do it himself. He has to find a way to make this work. After all, what else is there for him? What else could he possibly do? There is nothing left in this vast, busy city except the bottle and the rain that falls endlessly from the blue skies, water that no one sees or hears except Roy, drops that drown him in his guilt.

He bumps into a man at the market. He is tall and wears glasses over sharp green eyes, his smile broadening across the growing beard spreading over his chin. Roy glances at him and thinks, 'What kind of fool smiles when the world is so corrupted and dark? Doesn't he know it's already dead?'

When he comes home, though, he finally realizes the truth. He has yet to serve his purpose. He has yet to atone.

He will make everything right. He will make everything safe.

Roy comes home by train, but stops a town before reaching Central. He pays a wagon from there to take him through to the city, trying to ignore the image of Maes standing on the train platform, watching in confusion as the last soldiers stumble away and leave him alone there. He tells himself that it's best, that maybe he should request a transfer to another city as soon as possible to ensure Maes gets the picture.

The plan falls through. When he finally reaches the top of the steps to his apartment, he sees Maes sitting against his doorframe. Those green eyes are already fastened on his haggard face and reedy body, narrowing when he falters and trembles there in the hallway for a moment. He had not expected this.

He's stronger than this, Roy tells himself. So he pulls himself together and forces a smile. And he pretends there's nothing wrong.

Maes leaves quietly after a few hours when Roy falls asleep on the sofa, exhaustion deepening the caverns of his face. The man wakes with a blanket tucked securely around his shoulders, a meal prepared in the refrigerator, and a gentle note laying innocently on the coffee table amongst his boots and dogtags. It asks him to come to dinner the next night. Roy ignores it, but quenches the urge to burn it. Instead he slips it into the drawer of his desk for the days it will no longer hurt, should they exist.

He begins by checking out all the material that he needs-- gaping holes remain in his own book collection, things he's never needed to know before. The notes are scrawled out in his thin handwriting all across every scrap of paper he has, inside the margins of books, across the table top in black marker. The walls are dotted with the arrays, his favorite chair destroyed in ink as he systematically runs out of room and uses it for remaining formulas. The food goes old. He doesn't bother changing his clothes because no one will see him, anyway, and he's too used to being dirty as in Ishvar to actually bother fixing it.

The blood stains the floorboards and he ceases to care.

His chin is rough with stubble when Maes finally knocks, bearing the apple pie. He hasn't eaten anything for days. It makes him sick to smell it, but he lets the man inside. A few days ago, he would never have answered, but now he knows what he wants to say. He's finally realized the truth.

_'I want to become Fuhrer,'_ he tells Maes that evening. He doesn't touch the pie at all. He knows Gracia has made it. He doesn't want anything she's created. But he doesn't hate her. He wonders if he ever has, and something inside of him hurts badly enough that he quickly forgets it. She makes Maes happy. She makes him smile. She kept him from the war when Roy would have not.

He will become Fuhrer. It's all he has left. Even Maes, despite his friendship and support, has left him with the rot of his body and soul. That's what Roy thinks in that moment, standing in that dark room with the sound of Maes' chewing filling the air, and that's what he believes for a long time after.

This is when he lets Maes go, he thinks. But not really. Not really.

_Human transmutation, Roy thinks, is a dangerous thing to toy with. He would never go that path. It will only end in his death. _

There must be another way to atone. There must be something he can do to bring peace to the world, to silence its cruelty and injustice. A way to smother the cries of the anguished and bring the powers to their knees, bringing absolute order and happiness to every land in the country. He wants to make them all smile. He wants to free them from their troubles and pain.

Roy spends days in the darkness, sitting in that empty apartment. He stares at the walls. The blinds of the windows. The slits of light are the only thing he feeds upon.

No one comes to see him. The weeks stretch onward, only the sparse mail from the military coming in, and no one comes for him. The earth stretches around him and embraces him in its dank comfort, filling his lungs and tingling against his skin eagerly, ready to do his bidding.

It comes to him. Eventually, sluggishly, but the answer comes as it always has.

Sometimes Roy Mustang wonders what would have happened if he'd never met Maes Hughes.

If he hadn't been there at the edge, he may have fallen. In the weeks that passed that evening when Roy spoke his intentions sadly in that room, the world came back into the light. He had not lost everything. He had gained. He found allies and-- dare he say it-- friends, people who would back him when the time came to change the world. He tackled the ladder of promotions. He made his mask and wore it without regret, knowing beyond that, there was nothing.

And then, one day Maes had looked at him… and without warning or even reason, that arm wrapped around his shoulders and squeezed tightly. Just for a moment. Not even a minute. Lightly. Carefully. And then it had been gone.

Roy remembers how much that had hurt. But when he opened his lost eyes, Maes had only smiled at him, outlined in the brilliance of the sun through the windows, and he'd finally seen it. He'd never lost him. He'd lost himself.

He can't have everything, but he can have that back.

_The answer comes and Roy finally sees the it. He'd never lost the answer. He'd lost himself. _

He could have everything back the way it was. It was so simple. So utterly uncomplicated that Roy laughed, bent over himself on the floor, hands clutching his ribs as the sounds tore up through his esophagus.

Sometimes Roy Mustang wonders what would have happened if he'd never met Maes Hughes. But not anymore. It's something too horrifying to contemplate. The bitter regrets come alongside his warmth, and that's more than Roy has ever needed.

He will change the world with the hand that pushes him forward.

_He will save the world and burn it to ash._

_End_


End file.
